


paint the dawning sky in rainbow colors

by youjik33



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Canonically Ambiguous Character Death, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 12:11:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4136994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youjik33/pseuds/youjik33
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Relm saw after the world ended was a star. It gleamed white against the brown-purple sky, like a jewel in an oil slick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	paint the dawning sky in rainbow colors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [axilet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/axilet/gifts).



> This ended up more melancholy than I'd intended. I hope you still like it!

The first thing Relm saw after the world ended was a star. It gleamed white against the brown-purple sky, like a jewel in an oil slick.

She stared at it, and the rest of her surroundings came into focus around her: the silhouettes of broken treetops, the flicker and crackle of a nearby campfire, the scratchy but warm blanket that had been tucked tightly around her shoulders. She remembered the airship heaving beneath her, wood buckling, but nothing after.

"Hey, kiddo," a voice said softly. Sabin, crouched beside the fire, had seen that her eyes were open. "How are you feeling?"

"...did we lose?" Relm asked.

"Yeah," he said. "But just for now."

Leave it to Sabin to stay optimistic even after the apocalypse. Relm sat up, faced the fire, and realized they weren't alone. Shadow leaned against a tree trunk across from them, barely visible in the firelight, eyes glittering like polished stones. It seemed he hadn't been killed by the Empire after all. She felt a little surge of relief at that, and it surprised her.

Sabin handed her a canteen, and she drank deeply and gratefully.

"...everyone else...?" she asked as she handed it back.

He shrugged, looked away. "I don't know. I'm sure they're around somewhere. We're probably pretty scattered, though."

"They might be dead," Shadow said.

"And they might not be!" Sabin snapped back. "We don't know that. I'm sure your grandpa is fine, Relm."

Relm hadn't really been worried about her grandpa. Strago was tougher than he looked. Maybe it was partly Sabin's influence, but she didn't see any sense in assuming the worst. If she had fallen out of the sky and survived, so could he.

Her bag was nearby. Whether she'd been carrying it when she fell or just gotten lucky she couldn't remember, but she pulled it open, assessing the damage. A few of her brushes were broken, but her sketchbook and pencils were all intact. Her paints had been in a separate bag and were most likely lost, but she didn't need paint for her magical sketching, anyway.

She put a hand to her neck, and a bubble of panic suddenly threatened to burst through her. She bit her lip, held her breath, and fought it down. The chain that had hung there for years was gone, along with the ring that had been strung on it. The end of the world, the separation from her companions and her grandfather, that was one thing, but this was something she wasn't prepared for, didn't know if she could take.

Before the panic took hold, though, a figure appeared beside her, swift and silent. Shadow held out his hand, offered her the ring on its broken chain. She took it with a trembling hand.

"It was your mother's?" he said.

"Yeah," Relm said, embarrassed by the way her voice trembled. "How did you know that?"

He didn't respond.

 

 

They walked, even though they didn't know where they were going. The sun rose and set, but its light seemed weak, cold, and far away. Sabin offered to carry her, but Relm stubbornly refused until she nearly fainted.

"You don't have to push yourself so hard. You're still a kid," he said as she wrapped her arms around his neck. She was too tired to retort.

Shadow followed them, silent and unobtrusive as his namesake. Relm was usually very good at reading people, but even after almost a week of close travel, he was still a mystery. He was careful never to reveal his face, taking his meals away from them, and he didn't seem to have any particular feelings about anything. When Sabin told him that Interceptor was alive and wounded in Thamasa, he simply said "I see," with no hint of joy or relief.

 

 

They parted with Sabin in Albrook. He had to train, he said, and he wanted to find what had happened to their friends. "If I hear word of your grandpa, kiddo, I'll send a message as soon as I can, okay?" he said, ruffling her hair.

"Okay," she said with a smile. "Just come get me before you beat up Kefka, okay?"

Shadow just gave him a nod of acknowledgement.

The ship took over a week to reach Thamasa, which wasn't quite where anyone had expected it to be. The navigator grumbled and swore and redrew lines on his maps with a pencil. Relm amused herself by doing sketches of the sailors, and once of a dark-winged monster with a skull for a head that flew silently over the boat, but paid them no heed. She tried to draw Shadow, too, but even though he was always nearby, watching her silently, she couldn't seem to quite pin him down. Her pictures of him were technically perfect, but she couldn't help but think there was something missing.

 

 

There were more graves in the Thamasa cemetary, and the flowers on General Leo's tomb had long since died, but when Interceptor bounded to meet them, Relm threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his fur, and when Shadow knelt to scratch him between the ears, she could almost swear he was smiling beneath the mask. Her grandpa's house still stood empty; one of the neighbors must have been in to dust, because it looked as though they had just gone out for an afternoon walk.

"Are you going now?" Relm asked Shadow. She was walking through her room touching objects, amazed that they were all still in place – the pillows on the bed, the portrait of her mother smiling on the nightstand, the easel in the corner with a half-finished painting of a landscape that didn't exist any longer.

He didn't answer, and the silence went on so long that Relm turned around, half expecting him to have vanished without a word. But he was still there, just standing in the doorway, looking at Relm and the room with no hint of expression.

"I'll stay, for a little while," he said finally. "I have to make plans, and Interceptor isn't fully recovered."

He slept in her grandpa's old room. Sometimes she cooked the meals, and sometimes he did. Sometimes they chatted, a bit; mostly he avoided her. She spent the days painting and practicing magic, and he hunted monsters on the city outskirts with Interceptor. Sometimes she saw him talking quietly with the Esper he had been carrying, and more than once, she knew, he visited the graveyard. There was a familiarity to his presence she at first thought she must be imagining, but realization crept over her gradually, like a sunrise. But she still never saw his face, and she never confronted him with her new awareness, and then one day he was just gone, and Interceptor with him.

When the letter from Jidoor came, asking her to paint a portrait of an Esper, she accepted the invitation instantly, and wasn't entirely surprised when Owzer told her that the man who had recommended her skills had been a mysterious masked man with a dog.

 

 

"Aren't you mad at him?" Relm asked.

Gau, perched on the Falcon's railing, looked out towards the cottage sitting alone on the desolate plain, and pulled a silk ribbon from his uncharacteristically tamed hair.

"Why be mad?" he asked.

"Well, he abandoned you, didn't he?"

The boy shrugged. "He sick. His heart hurt; maybe mind hurt, too. He didn't mean to hurt Gau. He just not understand." The deck vibrated beneath them as the airship's engines rumbled to life, and Gau leapt deftly from the railing to the floor, landing on all fours. He cocked his head at her, eyes bright and thoughtful, and as the Falcon surged off the ground, said, "Your father, he hurt too."

"What?" Relm asked, stumbling backward a step with the airship's motion.

"It secret, right? It okay. I know. Interceptor, he know too. You smell like family. Gau not tell anyone."

"Thank you," she said softly. "Thanks, Gau. Um, do you want to play hide and seek?"

Gau always found her quickly. But in the ten minutes she was hiding in the cargo bay, she had a chance to have a nice private cry.

 

 

Of course they saved the day, eventually. Kefka was destroyed, his tower crumbled, the skies cleared; all over the world the survivors celebrated. On board the Falcon, as the last of the Espers vanished into twinkling light, it took some time for one man's absence to be noticed.

But Interceptor was behaving strangely, whining and nudging his nose against Relm's leg, and when she looked around the deck, at the rest of her companions hugging and cheering and weeping, she realized she had been abandoned again.

 

 

Weeks passed, and then months, and the world went on. Flowers grew, and the people started to rebuild. Relm finished Owzer's painting, and hoped that wherever Starlet was now, the gentle Esper was at peace.

South Figaro had always been a proud, resilient city. When they were thriving again the mayor commissioned a mural on a city wall, commemorating the heroes who had delivered the world from the brink of annihilation, and Relm was only too happy to oblige. Strago tagged along, though he wasn't moving as quickly as he used to; he would nap in the sun as she painted. Interceptor often lay at his feet, when he wasn't chasing sticks for children in the square.

There was no magic in her brush any more, but she felt this was one of her best pieces ever. She had come to know them all, and her paint captured the essence of what made them heroes – Terra's fierce determination, Setzer's confidence, Cyan's nobility; it was all there. She painted herself with a brush on her hand and a smile on her face, and Interceptor bristling beside her.

She saved the hardest person for last, and she painted him not as he had been when they fought Kefka, but the way she remembered him from the depths of her childhood memory – his brown hair, the grim set of his mouth, his sad haunted eyes.

"Oh, my dear Relm," Strago said when he saw it, laying his hand on her shoulder. "You poor child. I should have told you myself; I had no idea you knew."

"It's okay," she said. "We had other things to worry about."

And there was still a part of her, a foolish childish part, that held out hope that he had left that fallen tower after all, that one day he would appear with no mask any more, and hold her in his arms again. Maybe he was at their house in Thamasa right now, looking for her.

She shook her head with a sigh, pressed her hand to the edge of his cloak. The paint was still damp, and a bit of blue clung to the tips of her fingers.

"Goodbye, Daddy," she whispered.

 

 

 


End file.
